The new Know Nothings tell the same old story

Read an excellent op-ed today in America The Jesuit Review, "The new know-nothings? Anti-Catholic political rhetoric is making a comeback." The writer is Anna Keating. Under a big photo of Secretary of War and Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth, she begins this way:

President Abraham Lincoln once said of the Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860: “If the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”

As she notes, the Know Nothing Party shriveled up and died in 1860  but its attitudes have not. 

We are seeing a resurgence of anti-Catholic outbursts in the U.S. with the rise of the Trumpists and the outspoken nature of Pope Leo, an Irish-Catholic priest, then cardinal, now pope on the world's billion Catholics. Read Keating's article for the details. She writes about how fundies would stop her when she was growing up in Colorado Springs "and try to 'save' us." There also was this:

In fact, the Klu Klux Klan targeted my Catholic immigrant ancestors in the panhandle of Texas by burning crosses in their yards.

My grandfather, Martin Hett, an immigrant from County Roscommon, told us how the resurgent KKK burned crosses in his Irish-Catholic Denver neighborhood in the 1920s. My mother, Anna Marie Hett Shay, told us how she and her sister, dressed in their St. Francis Catholic School uniforms, had to run away from the South High School kids who chased them calling them "dirty Catholics" and "Catholic rednecks." This latter one was a new one on me. Grandpa explained that immigrants from Ireland were prone to red necks due to their fair skin and most jobs they could get in America were harvesting crops, digging ditches, and building railroads. Grandpa did not seem to bear any ill will toward these Know Nothing shitheads. But he had already been through hell and considered Colorado public school kids "small potatoes" when compared to his life as coal miner, railroad worker, and big fella who could take care of himself. 

I've written a bit about American Know Nothings. This has pissed off a few Republican friends who insist they are not Know-Nothings who get all sorts of news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. 

Know Nothings and the KKK play a role in my new novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver.”

For a look back at one of my blog posts, see Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestorsere.

Note the images that go along with it, cartoons of Irish immigrants as apes and drunkards. Those depictions tell a story that is as old as America.

P.S.: One of my first published stories was “REV,” about a fundamentalist Christian army marching across Arabia to whip an army of fundamentalist Muslims. I will see if I can dig it up.

In the local library stacks, find a book or two by Shay

Several weeks ago, I dropped off two of my books to the Volusia County Library in Ormond Beach. My favorite library now than I’m a Volusia County resident again, this time in Ormond Station in Ormond Beach. During my early years in the area, 1964-78, I lived in Ormonmd Beach, Holly Hill, and various locales in Daytona. I asked the friendly woman at the desk if the library was interested in stocking copies of my two books. I am a local author now, have been since August 2024 when Wyoming got shut of me.

The Ormond branch does such a great job of featuring local authors and now I’m part of the collections. It includes my historical novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver,” and my first collection of short stories, “The Weight of a Body.” Several of the stories are set in a place a lot like Daytona (Go Green Wave!) and there’s also a scene in another story set in Gainesville where I graduated from UF in 1976 (Go Gators!). The others are set in Colorado, Wyoming, and Maine. I spent decades of my working life in the Rocky Mountain states and visited Maine a few times.

I naturally did a library search for myself and came up with my books and mention of a few others with “Shay” in the listings. I have met several women during the last decade or so by the first name of Shay. I don’t know if it’s a thing or not. I doubt if I would recognize a thing if it was staring me in the face.

There was on listing that caught my eye. From the Harlequin Western Romance Anthology 2017 comes this reference to a romance with a Shay in it:

THE COWBOY'S TRIPLE SURPRISE The Hitching Post Hotel by Barbara White Daille Bachelor cowboy Tyler Buckham is stunned to learn Shay O'Neill is pregnant with triplets. Even though he wants to do right by Shay, the thought of being a daddy has him running scared.

That’s a pretty good teaser and I may check out the anthology to see how it ends. I also am intrigued by the title. In Cheyenne, where I lived and worked for 31 years, there was a landmark hotel called the Hitching Post Inn. It was a big gathering place, a local favorite for weddings, arts events, and political gatherings. If you wanted to catch one of the state legislators on neutral ground, the Hitch saloon was the place. I wondered: does the author have Cheyenne roots? Probably not. The term “hitching post” is very western and I’ve probably been in a dozen places with that name during my travels in the west.

I looked up Daille and she lists her home as “the Southwest” so that probably means Arizona and there is a Hitch out in the desert somewhere and probably doesn’t refer to my Hitch which was torn down a few years ago and replaced with an extended stay hotel.

I encourage local readers to check out my books from the library and write a review on the site if you’ve a mind to. Now excuse me as I go out and prowl the Local Authors and Large Print sections at my favorite library.

Journey into "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights"

This is the opening of a story included in "The Weight of a Body," my first story collection. It was first published by Ghost Road Press at its tiny office on Evans Avenue off I-25 in Denver.  I dropped by on a summer day in 2005 to pick up the first copies hot off the press. I was dying to show off the books. I delivered the first copy to my uncle. I owed him a visit. His reading was mostly focused on the Denver dailies sports pages -- he was an athlete and a coach -- but he congratulated me and said he'd read it. I then drove back the 95 miles to Cheyenne to share the news with my family. My favorite story is set in a Florida beach town where I spent some of my youth. It has some basis in fact. I did grow up as the oldest kid in a big Irish-Catholic family. My brother and I walked to the beach to surf. My father was a reclusive sort but who can blame him?

I share this as a teaser to my story collection. I have another one in the works but the first one still has some zing. That's the author speaking. Anyway, to read more click on the cover image in the right sidebar.  The collection goes for $14.99 but if you're as dedicated a Kindle reader as I am, you can get a bargain. Check it out.

Raymond Custy’s Garden of Worldly Delights

            In June of 1967, when I was almost 16, my father checked out for a year. Locked himself in his room. Threw away the key. No messages. No contact of any kind. It was as if he died or decamped to Tahiti, only worse, because I could walk down the hall past that locked door and hear London Philharmonic symphonies blasting from the hi-fi. A cough might erupt from behind closed doors; the whisper of slippered feet. Sometimes a thin blue stream of cigarette smoke escaped from the room and formed a cloud in the hallway. If I was alone, I would stand in the midst of the cloud and inhale, hoping that the smoke might be the bearer of some singular message from my dad, the hermit.

            This hermit lived surrounded by eleven children, one wife, two dogs, a cat and a cage full of hamsters. On the brilliant June day my father bolted the door, the family queued up to coax him out. My mother went first. "Raymond Custy!" she yelled. "You come out of there right this minute!"  She waited, arms crossed, bare feet tapping on the wooden floors. I could hear the cars passing on the street, on their way to the beach. I could even hear the slap of the waves on the sand two blocks away.

OK people, it's all true, every single bit and byte of it

This photo arrived in my inbox on the same day that "Disclosure Day"
arrived in theaters nationwide. Coincidence? You decide.

How a book does -- and doesn't -- get published

Part of my life as a blogger is updating readers as to my whereabouts (I've always wanted to blog this word). Most of the time, I'm in my home office at the PC, typing madly. There are big windows to watch passersby pass by, most of them neighbors in Tomoka Station, Fla. There are lots of kids in my neighborhood, many new arrivals being pushed around by proud parents. Kids on bikes, some motorized but most the old-fashioned pedal kind. Groveside is a new branch of a five-branched development. I see many service trucks: lawn services, fencing companies, contractors building various add-ons: fancy stoves and refrigerators to replace the boring ones the houses came with. Toilets, too, as we got basic toilets  but tall and big and disabled people needed something better.

I have a lot to see, many things to distract me from the jobs at hand. My main job now is promoting my new book. It is no easy task. Best-selling writers have big-time publishers in NYC, companies that handle a book's editing, production, distribution, and publicity. That's what all writers wish for, an advance and a contract for a book to write and revise and then transmit to the publisher. Then it's on to the next book. Or maybe a croissant and a cup of Java. 

That was what the world was like when I first started writing in the 1970s. When I finally penned a sci-fi postapocalyptic novel of my own in the 1980s, I went to a writers conference and landed an agent. I became a pest. Finally, Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency said send me a few chapters and quickly disappeared. The next week, I polished some intro chapters and a short plot description and sent it off to Ray. He told me to finish the manuscript and send it. 

I will bet you a chest filled with doubloons (or maybe bitcoins) that he thought I would never finish. Many writers don't, you know, especially when they find out how hard a task it really is. But I had a secret weapon. I was born to write and was always hard at it. I don't know why this is. It's beautiful. It's a curse. I am happiest when writing in a journal or pounding away at my keyboard. I have tried to escape into the military, academia, the corporate world. But I keep returning to writing. 

My novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," took me ten years to write, revise, and find a publisher. My critique group guided me along the way. I got an M.F.A. in creative writing. My CSU profs and fellow student writers were terrific and brutal. I was on a mission from God, as the Blues Brothers put so well. How else to describe it? In the end, though, that's what it takes., You have to possess a missionary zeal to do this. You have to write and quit writing and write more and despair and then write more. In the end, I finished a found an iconoclastic press in Detroit run by a friend, poet/prof/performer M.L. Liebler.

The Ridgeway Press of Michigan publishes books that others don't and I'm one of them. Thank you Ridgeway and M.L He's published tons of books of poetry and essays. His most recent is a memoir with this title: "Hound Dog: A Memoir of Rock, Revolution, and Redemption" from University of Wisconsin Stevens Point's Cornerstone Press. Did you know that university presses publish many wonderful books? Go buy one today. 

Meanwhile, if you're interested in my book, you will have to go to Amazon and look me up on my author page at http://amazon.com/author/michaeltshay. I am at work on an author's page on BookBub which should be the place to go once I'm finished with the design. 

One more thing: I don't make much money from an Amazon purchase. And Ridgeway is not set up for buying books. But you can find me on Venmo at @michael-shay-28 or 307-241-2903. Send me $35.22 and put the mailing address and who to sign it to in Notes. Then, I will put it in a padded envelope, take it to the p.o., send it on its way and pray that it gets there in these times that USPS seems to run with all the efficiency of the governmental agency in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." Keep your fingers crossed. As you probably know, Amazon is run with the efficiency that we used to expect from USPS. Packages go right to my door. The delivery man even rings to bell and scampers back to his Amazon Prime truck and drives away at a prudent speed. 

I decided to look up Amazon Founder and Blue Origin mastermind Jeff Bezos on Wikipedia. I was surprised to find that he was born in Albuquerque (I was conceived in Albuquerque!) to a teen mom and a Danish unicyclist (my father sold Armour meats and my mom was a registered nurse). During his high school years in Miami, Bezos attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, my alma mater (English major, class of '76). A local newspaper reported that in his graduation speech, Bezos "hoped that humanity would eventually move heavy industry and large populations into space while preserving earth as 'a huge national park.' "

Think about that when you order an air fryer at deep discount from Amazon. Or a book.

Readers are beginning to have questions and comments about the novel...

I should have done this a long time ago but today I created an author page on Book Bub under Michael T Shay. The road to writing and editing a book ends with a book that needs readers, surprisingly enough. I thought my blog and in-person marketing would be sufficient. But it's not. While I get the new site up and running, please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments about "Zeppelins Over Denver" here. I can answer your questions on this public forum or via e-mail or by letter. Please ask me to respond via letter! I am a lifelong writer of letters and receive so few these days. Many circulars about metal roofs and new-car sales and restaurant openings. But few letters. Thrill me!

Via Audible, I spend a year in an Irish garden

On my June 1 post, I talked about buying on Audible "In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden." I mentioned that I don't listen to many audiobooks as my vision remains fine and I love reading. There's a little message inside my head that says: "Audiobooks are for endless drives across Wyoming." During my 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council, I made many drives across the 98,000-square mile state and listened to cassettes, disks, and, briefly, on one overlooked Spotify intro subscription in a state auto. 

So many great memories of Janet Evanovich (perfect to distract a keyed-up driver on I-80 winter drives), a dozen Wyoming-based mysteries by C.J. Box and Craig Johnson, an odd Chuck Palahniuk novel on the way to Sheridan (weird scene in a swimming pool), and one perfect summer drive to Jackson with geological landmarks discussed in John McPhee's "Rising from the Plains." Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" got me all the way from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City. 

So here I am, taking a break from the printed page and listening to the wonderful voices of Niall Williams and Christine Breen on Audible. Twelve months in an Irish garden. I am transfixed. My Irish roots and life-long gardening interests are both addressed. In "March," an Irish priest dropped by the narrators' little patch of land in County Clare, and conducted mass in the garden. Neither Niall or Chris are active Catholics (more the fallen-away variety) but both agree and it's glorious. 

But there was something about it.

Quote from Chapter 4, April

"The moment of spring sets everything within me tremoring."

I've felt it in Wyoming. 

March is filled with wind-whipped snowstorms. April's beginning can be much the same. But there is a day when I step out to sun and calm. I look at the garden. A few bulb plants bloom. It's still six weeks before I put seedlings in the ground. 

But it's the light of those early April days that transform me. Every day the light stretches out to those long summer days. On June 21, the western sky is still lit at 10. I love and fear that day as days start to get shorter until it's dark at 4:30 in late November, even at Halloween the kids gets started going door to door before 5.

I have felt the tremoring Williams describes. Here in Florida, it is calmed by the coming of heat and humidity. By June 6, the tremoring has given way to sweat and sunburn.